[pzh]

The “ideas and thoughts” that you mention are not one-off ideas that somebody came up with in 10 minutes. The big concern is that what is stolen is ideas that are the result of decades of investment in R&D with significant monetary value. Just because manufacturing can be done on the cheap doesn’t mean that coming up with the invention didn’t take a 100x investment.

[Jach]

IP isn't remotely valued proportional to its investment, and a lot of highly valued IP doesn't take such efforts to create. Indeed in some cases how could it, if the innovation requires a random walk through the design space? The first company that found it might have just gotten unlucky with a path that took decades of trial and error when a different path might have found it sooner or cheaper (but no one else was looking, or were on yet another path).

In thinking over IP reform (and avoiding getting upset about China stealing it) it'd be better to question the notion that the IP is centrally important rather than phrase things just in terms of rich vs non-rich people... A starting question: even if you know all the written details about X, can you still go make your own X? Following up, for the Xs you can, can you do it in a shorter time frame than someone who already has X can develop a better X' that keeps their ROI number positive?

The current top comment on this page posits that the answers to these for many international businesses were "sometimes, no":

> International companies in a rush to get access to the largest single market in the world have freely given away their IP, because they didn't think the Chinese could ever catch up.

I don't think this logic has changed, but instead international companies have stopped innovating as much, which allowed China to catch up. (The US did the same thing to Europe.) They want to rest on their laurels for longer instead of innovating more, and IP distribution (from sharing, theft, expiration, or otherwise) does put a timer on how long you can rest.

[prolikewh0a]

And now that research is available to society as a whole to benefit them in an open and likely now cheap way.

Some already super rich people and companies lost money, but so what? I'm sure they'll be able to put food on their families tables until the heat death of the universe.

[pzh]

It’s not as simple and clear cut as you make it out to be. The IP theft actually destroys many small businesses and companies that were trying to disrupt an industry by coming up with something original. There are many cases like this one: https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/business/america...